The team survived the upheaval caused by Hurricane Katrina and speculation that the owner, Tom Benson, might take it to another city. But the team might not be in New Orleans had Representative Hale Boggs, a Louisiana Democrat, not helped maneuver legislation through Congress.

“Wasn’t that a great game?” Boggs’s daughter Cokie Roberts, an ABC News and NPR correspondent, said Monday from Bethesda, Md., referring to the Saints’ overtime victory Sunday over Minnesota to win the National Football Conference title. “I was just screaming my head off.”

David F. Dixon, a local entrepreneur who led the effort to bring a franchise to New Orleans, was just as thrilled, but a heart problem kept him from attending the game at the Louisiana Superdome. “I watched every second of it on television,” he said Monday from New Orleans, “and it was just a great, great experience.”

The Saints were the offspring of Congressional approval of the National Football League-American Football League merger in 1966. And it was Boggs, the House majority whip at the time, who guided passage of a law that granted the leagues the limited immunity from antitrust laws that they needed to merge.

“He was pleased that they pulled it off,” Roberts said in a telephone interview. “He was majority whip and Russell Long was majority whip of the Senate. If they couldn’t do it, who could?” Long was a powerful senator from Louisiana; he and Boggs served on the House-Senate conference committee that crafted the bill.

Dixon had staged extraordinarily well-attended N.F.L. exhibition games at Tulane Stadium, but he wanted something much bigger. “I always knew New Orleans was a great football town, way back to the 1930s,” he said. He persuaded Tulane to be the home of the future Saints. He and the older Boggs had been fraternity brothers at the university.

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The leagues announced their merger in June 1966 but needed the blessing of Congress. Emanuel Celler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, opposed change, and Pete Rozelle, the N.F.L. commissioner, needed to execute a legislative end run.

“Pete called me and said, ‘Dave, what can you do to help?’ ” Dixon said. “I said, ‘Pete, there are two prominent guys who can be of huge help, and I’m pretty sure I can get their support if I talk to them, and that’s Hale Boggs and Russell Long.’ ” Boggs, he added, needed a jolt to his popularity, which was hurt by his support for the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Dixon said he sent a public relations adviser, David Kleck, who had worked for Boggs, to Washington “with a full set of instructions” about what to say to the majority whip. “Hale said he could support it, and he stood firm, so we were able to overcome Celler’s opposition through Hale and Russell being on the Senate Finance Committee.”

In his book “America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation,” Michael MacCambridge wrote that the N.F.L. was already looking to expand to New Orleans and offered Boggs the swap of a franchise for the antitrust exemption.

Boggs was serious enough about the deal to blow up at Rozelle before the conference committee’s vote on the legislation, which was one of many riders to an anti-inflation bill that was expected to pass. According to MacCambridge, as Rozelle and Boggs walked to the Capitol Rotunda, Rozelle said he did not know how to thank Boggs.

“What do you mean you don’t know how to thank me?” Boggs said. “New Orleans gets an immediate franchise in the N.F.L.”

Boggs’s son, Thomas, was then a 26-year-old tax lawyer. (“Rozelle tried to hire me,” he said, to help get the legislation passed.) On Monday he described the quid pro quo. Boggs said that during a break in the committee’s hearing, “my old man was out in the hall with Rozelle, and Rozelle asked, ‘Have you done anything with our amendment?’ and my father said, ‘Have you done anything with my team?’ ”

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At another point, Boggs said, Rozelle sent a note into the committee room telling the elder Boggs that he had polled N.F.L. owners and that they had “approved of New Orleans.”

“And the committee approved the exemption,” said Boggs, a partner in the Washington law firm Patton Boggs.

He said that until his father died in a light plane crash six years later he bragged about getting a team for New Orleans.

“He’d take all the credit,” he said, “and fight Long for it. They’d both deserve it.”

E-mail: sandor@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on January 27, 2010, on page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: Congress’s Team: Deal for Merger Included Saints. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe